Petty Police State
Paul Jacob, Common Sense: Could the most important thing one does for one’s community be to send a pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution to local politicians and police? Some officers in the Dallas Police Department are doing things against the letter and the spirit of our laws. After writing a traffic ticket up, and getting the signature, too many on the force then add on infractions. Gretchen West was stopped for a burned-out tail light. She took away her ticket for $220. And paid. Then she got a letter in the mail, saying she owed an extra $378 for failing to wear a seatbelt and driving without her headlights on. But, but . . . the officer had not mentioned those alleged violations! The Dallas Morning News informs us that an assistant city attorney documented about a dozen cases like this in recent months. This weird twist on ex post facto law is Kafkaesque, actually, the kind of thing you’d expect from a police state.
Now, I know: Dallas, Texas, today, is a better place to live in than was Moscow, USSR, circa 1950. The Soviets set in place a totalitarian police state. Here in America, when our rulers and enforcers forget the importance of the rule of law, and the primacy of citizen liberties, they tend to set up not totalitarian police states but petty ones. . . . But it’s just not the American way.
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Posted by Bill Smith at 8:45 PM - Post Link
2 Comments:
The real sovereign now.
Time was, true sovereignty of this land resided in its people. And that limited sovereignty was enumerated to a Congress by the peoples' consent to be governed. That's the theory anyway.
Want to bet, when the people finally get around to actually limiting government growth, the taxing class is going to respond in this sort of activity more and more. And then we, as a people, will find out just who is the real sovereign now.
ex animo
davidfarrar
Pocket Constitutions? Could the most important thing one does for one’s community be to send a pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution to local politicians and police?
Yes! Well, that is, if they'd read and understand it. Heck, congress and the president swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and most of them have no familiarity with its contents whatsoever. It seems odd to me that lawmakers can break the law at our highest level of government while the peon class has the entire book thrown at them for the tiniest infraction. Ignorance of the law should be no excuse at any level.
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